Jonathan Kellerman - Silent Partner

“Brings back memories,” I said, squeezing behind a front-row seat.

“Oh, really? Did you attend a school like this?”

“We had more than one room, but the setting was similar.”

“Where was that, Dr. Delaware?”

Dr. Delaware . I hadn’t given her my title. “Missouri.”

“A midwesterner,” she said. “I’m originally from New York. If someone had told me I’d end up in a sleepy little hamlet like Willow Glen, I’d have thought it hilarious.”

“Where in New York?”

“Long Island. The Hamptons- not the wealthy part. My people serviced the idle rich.”

She went back behind her desk and sat.

“If you’re thirsty,” she said, “there’s a cooler full of drinks around back, but I’m afraid all we’ve got is milk, chocolate milk, or orange drink.” She smiled, got younger again. “I’ve repeated that so many times it’s etched indelibly into my brain.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I had a big lunch.”

“Wendy’s a wonderful cook, isn’t she?”

“Wonderful early warning system too.”

“As I said, Dr. Delaware, this is a sleepy little hamlet. Everyone knows everything about everybody.”

“Does that include knowledge of Shirlee and Jasper Ransom?”

“Especially them. They need special kindness.”

“Especially now,” I said.

Her face collapsed, as if suddenly filleted. “Oh, gosh,” she said, and opened a desk drawer. Taking out an embroidered handkerchief, she dabbed at her eyes. When she turned them on me again, grief had made them even larger.

“They don’t read the papers,” she said, “can barely read a primer. How am I going to tell them?”

I had no answer for that. I was weary of searching for answers. “Do they have other family?”

She shook her head. “She was all they had. And me. I’ve become their mother. I know I’m going to have to deal with it.”

She pressed the handkerchief to her face like a poultice.

“Please excuse me,” she said. “I’m as shaky as the day I read about it- that was a horror. I just can’t believe it. She was so beautiful, so alive.”

“Yes, she was.”

“For all intents and purposes I was the one who raised her. And now she’s gone, blotted out. As if she never existed in the first place. Such a damned, ugly waste. Thinking about it makes me angry at her. Which is unfair. It was her life. She never asked for what I gave her, never… Oh, I don’t know!”

She averted her face. Her makeup had started to run. She reminded me of a parade float the morning after.

I said, “It was her life. But she left a lot of people grieving.”

“This is more than grief,” she said. “I’ve just been through that. This is worse. I thought I knew her like a daughter, but all these years she must have been carrying around so much pain. I had no idea- she never expressed it.”

“No one knew,” I said. “She never really showed herself.”

She threw up her hands and let them drop like dead weights. “What could have been so terrible that she lost all hope?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m up here, Mrs. Leidecker.”

“Helen.”

“Alex.”

“Alex,” she said. “Alex Delaware. How strange to meet you after all these years. In a way I feel I know you. She told me all about you- how much she loved you. She considered you the one true love of her life, even though she knew it could never work out because of your sister. Despite that, she admired you so deeply for the way you devoted yourself to Joan.”

She must have read the shock on my face as pain and gave me a look rich with sympathy.

“Joan,” I said.

“The poor thing. How’s she doing?”

“About the same.”

She nodded sadly. “Sharon knew her condition would never really improve. But even though your commitment to Joan meant you could never commit fully to anyone else, she admired you for it. If anything, I’d say it intensified her love for you. She talked about you as if you were a saint. She felt that kind of family loyalty was so rare nowadays.”

“I’m hardly a saint,” I said.

“But you are a good man. And that old cliché remains valid as ever: They’re hard to find.” A faraway look came onto her face. “Mr. Leidecker was one. Taciturn, a stubborn Dutchman, but a heart of gold. Gabe has some of that goodness- he’s a kind boy. I only hope losing his dad so young doesn’t harden him.”

She stood up, walked over to one of the blackboards, and made a few cursory swipes with a rag. The effort seemed to exhaust her. She returned to her seat, straightened papers, and said, “It’s been a year for losses. Poor Shirlee and Jasper. I so dread telling them. It’s my own doing. I changed their lives; now the change has wrought tragedy.”

“There’s no reason to blame you-”

“Please,” she said gently. “I know it’s not rational, but I can’t help the way I feel. If I hadn’t gotten involved in their lives, things would have been different.”

“But not necessarily better.”

“Who knows,” she said. Her eyes had filled with tears. “Who knows.”

She looked at the clock on the wall. “I’ve been cooped up in here all afternoon grading papers. I could really use a stretch.”

“Me too.”

As we descended the schoolhouse steps I pointed to the wooden sign.

“The Blalock Ranch. Weren’t they into shipping, or something?”

“Steel and railroads. It was never really a ranch. Back in the twenties, they were competing with Southern Pacific for the rail lines connecting California with the rest of the country. They surveyed San Bernardino and Riverside for an inland route and bought up a good chunk of both counties- entire villages at a time. They paid top dollar to get Willow Glen land away from the apple farmers who’d homesteaded it since the Civil War. The result was a huge spread that they called a ranch. But they never grew or raised anything on it, just fenced it in and posted guards. And the railroad was never built- the Depression. After World War Two, they started selling some of the smaller parcels back to private people. But several of the big tracts were snapped up by another corporation.”

“Which one?”

She patted her hair. “Some aviation concern- the one run by that mad billionaire, Belding.” She smiled. “And that, Dr. Delaware, is your California history lesson for the day.”

We entered the playground, strolled past swings and slides, headed toward the forest that carpeted the foot of the mountains.

“Does Magna still own land here?” I asked.

“Plenty of it. But they won’t sell. People have tried. For all intents and purposes that keeps Willow Glen a backwater speck. Most of the old families have given up, sold out to rich doctors and lawyers who use the orchards for tax write-offs and run them down- capped irrigation lines, no pruning or fertilizing. Most of them don’t even bother to come up and harvest. In some places the earth’s turned hard and dry as cement. The few growers who’ve stayed have become suspicious and mistrustful- they’re convinced it’s all part of a conspiracy to run things down so the city folk can buy what’s left on the cheap and put up condominiums or something.”

“That’s what Wendy thought.”

“Her folks are newcomers, really pretty naïve. But you have to admire them for trying.”

“Who owns the land Jasper and Shirlee live on?”

“That’s Magna land.”

“Is that common knowledge?”

“Mr. Leidecker told me, and he was hardly a gossip.”

“How’d they end up there?”

“No one knows. According to Mr. Leidecker- I wasn’t living here then- they showed up at the general store to buy groceries back in 1956- back when there was a general store. When people tried to talk to them, Jasper waved his hands and grunted and she giggled. It was obvious they were retarded- children who’ll never grow up. The prevailing theory is that they escaped from some institution, maybe wandered away from a bus and ended up here by accident. People help them when it’s needed, but in general no one pays them much mind. They’re harmless.”